South Africa 1959

South Africa 1959, like Picasso’s Guernica and Feni’s African Guernica, is a landmark painting that directly addresses the injustices, destruction and pain brought about by a repressive political ideology.

It was first shown in Cape Town in the year it was made. In Adams’s masterful triptych, the brutality and degradation of the political system are clearly seen in the tortured figures stretched across the three canvases. The painting is both allegorical and prophetic, and it chillingly predates the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 by only a few months.

Adams returned to London permanently in 1967. He would never again broach the subject of apartheid so directly, preferring to use tropes such as imprisonment, and the allegory of the ‘monkey on the back’ to make his powerful thematic points. 

Artwork courtesy of Johannesburg Art Gallery.